iPod inventor says having kids has changed how Silicon Valley's founders think about privacy

• Tony Fadell, inventor of the iPod, said having kids changed how he and others in tech view the world.
• Specifically, Fadell said he and many other founders now think differently about privacy issues.
• Fadell spoke about the trade-offs with privacy that will come with AI-enabled devices.

Becoming parents has changed more than just the work schedules for Silicon Valley's elite, according to the "father of the iPod."

Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who invented the popular music player, said that founders he's worked with think differently about privacy issues after going through the life-changing experience of having kids.

"I remember a marked way difference in the way I thought about the world before I had kids and after I had kids," Fadell told Eric Newcomer during a recent interview on the journalist's podcast.

Fadell said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin think about the world "in a very different way" now than before they had kids or were married.

"'I want everything all the time. I'll give away all my privacy. I don't care what happens with all this data,'" Fadell said, describing the pre-parenthood viewpoint. "As soon as you have kids and you start hearing about deepfakes, and you start hearing about social engineering, and you start hearing about all this other stuff, you start changing your view on how much data you want sucked up and how you're being protected."

Zuckerberg has previously spoken about how becoming a parent changed how he led Facebook, now Meta. Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan. Their eldest child was born in 2015.

"Having kids does change how you think about the world in a pretty dramatic way," Zuckerberg told students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 2017, according to a CNBC report of his remarks.

Page has two children with his wife, research scientist Lucinda Southworth. Brin has three children, two with his first wife Anne Wojcicki, the founder of genetics testing company 23andMe, and one with Nicole Shanahan, the founder of a legal-tech startup and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s former vice presidential running mate in the 2024 election.

AI companies are being closely watched

On the broader issue of children, privacy, and AI, Congress and regulators around the globe are closely scrutinizing tech companies.

Elon Musk's xAI is facing probes ranging from the California Attorney General's office to Britain's Ofcom over Grok generating sexualized images of real people, including minors, without their permission. On January 14, xAI said it had implemented measures to prevent the Grok account from generating such images on the platform, though tests showed Grok continued to produce sexualized images of real people within the Grok app.

"We take action to remove high-priority violative content, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity, taking appropriate action against accounts that violate our X Rules,"xAI's official account said in a post on X.

In August, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that the company was changing how its AI chatbots respond to children. Congressional lawmakers had pressed the social network after Reuters reported that internal Meta documents showed it was acceptable for a chatbot to engage in romantic conversations with children.

Fadell and Newcomer discussed how society, and even company leaders, might approach AI-enabled devices that require access to large amounts of personal data, including real-time inputs, to be truly revolutionary.

"I know for a fact I worked with these guys, some of these founders, that they think about the world differently, and they wish they would've made some different moves and different decisions early on, and would like to go back, but they can't," Fadell said.